Last week, a motley and anachronistic crew of liberal Anglican theologians and dissenting ministers, in collaboration with the think tank Ekklesia, launched the Common Wealth: Christians for Economic and Social Justice initiative, whose purpose is to oppose government cuts in public spending and welfare provision. It in turn urges the churches not to collude with such measures by supporting and enabling the "Big Society" agenda, insisting that "churches should not be deceived by claims that the government is sympathetic to Christian ideals ... The 'Big Society' masks injustice, suffocating dissent with phoney 'we're all in it together' sound bites."

On one level, one can agree with Common Wealth about the unnecessary pace and regressive social impact of some of the budget cuts - although their scale is being somewhat exaggerated. And yet the reaction of this group is superficial, and is in sharp contrast to that of the Archbishop of Canterbury who has proffered "two and a half cheers for the Big Society."

Now, five-sixths support is really quite a lot, and probably gets it about right. It is clear that Rowan Williams realises - and Common Wealth does not - that the Big Society is more than a mere cover for further neoliberal privatisation. To the extent that it is, and to the extent that it fails to tackle the injustices and monopolies of the market as much as those of the state, it deserves half a cheer to be withheld. But there are four crucial reasons why the big society is no neo-Thatcherite sham.

First, many even among the Tories have been dismayed to discover that "the Big Society" is not simply David Cameron's code for dismantling the state. One could almost hear the dismay conveyed by the notable lack of applause when Cameron announced to the recent party conference that he does "not believe in laissez-faire" and proposed to use both government work schemes and measures to channel more finance to local and small business in order to take up some of the slack from a reduction in government employment.

To be sure, none of this goes far enough - but the point is that it already goes too far for perhaps the majority of the British Conservative party. But more crucially, the positive aspect of the reforms in social provision (sadly overshadowed by debates about the cuts) all concern a rather remarkable experiment in seeking to mutualise government services, to give more power in decision-making to front-line operators and to establish a more direct relationship between users and suppliers of various services.

The second reason is that the Labour party has by no means indulged in any kind of simplistic opposition to this new development. In fact, Ed Miliband has been accused of quiescence, because he is properly taking time to rethink policy after the manifest failure and end of the New Labour era.

All the signs so far are that Miliband is cautiously inclined towards his own leftish version of the Big Society that would pick up once more the more genuinely mutualist and participatory ideas of Blair in his early phase of more creative thinking, which he soon abandoned.

One key indication here is the remarkable elevation under Miliband's sponsorship of the social theorist Maurice Glasman, who is an admirer both of Karl Polanyi and of the non-statist religious and associationist tradition in Labour's deep past.

The third and much more crucial reason is that the Big Society has far more to do with existing social and economic trends than with mere party politics. Ever since 1989, under the influence of former Eastern Bloc thinking, the role of "civil society" as a personalist balance to the materialism of both market and state has come back into the centre of politics.

And this has happened even more in practice than in theory, for whatever combination of reasons. There has been a new surge in the importance of charities and voluntary welfare activism, plus a great rise in the number of social enterprises, not-for-profit organisations and hybrid businesses which combine for-profit and not for-profit activities.

Now some of the reasons that can be given for the growth of this "third sector" can accurately be called cynical. Businesses can try to imbue even charity with a capitalist logic, or find that charitable involvement is good for their image and ultimately for profit. Meanwhile governments can find that they can supply services more cheaply and more efficiently, yet without surrendering bureaucratic control, by turning to the assistance of voluntary agencies.

Yet even such cynical intent would not change the fact that this is giving a new public opportunity to genuine motives of social purpose and the pursuit of interpersonal aid.

Moreover, the "cynical" explanation is insufficient: more crucial is the manifest failure of both state and market to meet some of our most fundamental human needs. This is because both institutions think and operate in materialistic, instrumentalist terms that cannot supply the currency of tacit trust and unwritten tradition that is required in order for any social formation to operate.

What we are now beginning to realise is that Hayekian criticisms of the centralising state for ignoring the vital dimension of trust and tradition apply equally to a merely formalist market itself - which Hayek failed to realise.

Given that neither state nor market are able to supply various crucial local needs, we are seeing a natural return to mutual collaboration in order to make up for this lack - anything from voluntary-aided independent schools taking supposedly "impossible' students to cooperatives committed to keeping old bicycles in constant repair and renewed circulation.

It would be sheer ideological dogmatism - whether of the Right or of the Left - to suppose that this kind of development is an aberration: a sign that there isn't enough "genuine" capitalist enterprise on the one hand, or that the state is abrogating its responsibilities on the other.

On the contrary, there are inherent limits to any system's attempts to dispense with the role of trust and reciprocal assistance. Central planning cannot assess people's various local and changing needs, while the pursuit of profit leaves many genuine needs and demands totally unmet.

In addition, we should welcome the rise of the third sector because it vastly increases the instance of genuine, spontaneous and participatory democracy in operation. By contrast, the overwhelming evidence is that merely representative democracy has reduced the ordinary person's real decision-making power which can only come about through neighbourly collaboration.

Fixation on the ballot-box means that governments are increasingly able to manipulate the choices of individuals in a vulgar Benthamite manner that is supposed to increase their passive, consumerist "happiness." The population is in turn bought off with "welfare" which blinds them to the injustices of the workplace and releases them from any active thought as to what the pursuit of true education, true health and true care for others might really involve.

This brings me to the fourth and equally crucial reason. Participatory democracy, in the realms both of welfare and of co-operative and stakeholder enterprise, was in the British past (as elsewhere in Europe and the Americas and Australasia) almost entirely tied up with the practice of religion.

It allowed intimate and collaborative relationships between donors and beneficiaries; it guarded against loneliness; it ensured an holistic union of body and spirit when it came to schooling and nursing; it rendered domestic labour communal and collaborative and it encouraged far more communication across class boundaries than pertains today.

Moreover, it gave an enormous role to women, often pursuing their tasks in what they took to be a specifically "female" way: voluntary, spontaneous, interpersonal, improvisatory, mixing up work with leisure and celebration. The exchange of the authority of husband and father (though many religious feminists were already on equal terms with their spouses) for that of state and suffrage ironically led, as Prochaska shows, to a decline in the importance of independent female power, including the power to vote in voluntary associations, and the increased submission of women to highly "masculine" modes of thought and practice.

However, all this activity - although Prochaska rather downplays this - was in considerable measure intended to ameliorate the perceived evils of the market. Eventually, Christians in Britain came to realise that voluntary provision was not enough to protect against its ravages, especially after church infrastructure was decimated by two world wars.

Ironically, it was the religious tradition of welfare which itself played a big role, through the influence of William Temple and others, in erecting the welfare state which quite quickly destroyed this tradition and the moral energies which it had nurtured.

There are many important tensions around this event: the architects of the welfare state like William Beveridge and Clement Attlee meant it to be more mutualist than it has turned out to be; others wished that it had taken a different form, involving a systematic collaboration between voluntary and state agencies.

Indeed, there has always been a debate within Anglicanism between the statist Temple-tradition on the one hand, and the "Christendom" perspective of John Neville Figgis though to V.C. Demant and T.S. Eliot - deriving variously from the Oxford Movement, Radical Tory evangelicalism, non-statist Christian socialism and Catholic distributism - on the other.

Within this "Christendom" perspective, it is the Church itself that is the real site of the redeemed society, of true human collaboration. In this respect the Church should operate as the fulcrum for the growth of civil society.

Common Wealth represents the former tradition. Rowan Williams, the Radical Orthodoxy group (to which I belong) and increasingly many of the current Anglican episcopal bench, represent the latter, "Christendom" legacy. No-one should say which group has it right without a considerable pause for reflection.

To some degree, given the anarchy of the market and the sheer fluidity of modern life, the state takeover of welfare has been inevitable. However, it is equally true that this takeover has run into endlessly more problems, and that it has not halted a capitalist slide into renewed inequality.

There is something now rather pathetic about erstwhile radicals who think that the most "leftwing" thing to do is to try to shore up crumbling state enterprises that are in themselves merely flimsy defences against the rapacities of unconstrained profit-seeking.

It may seem as if state provision is more stable than voluntary mutualism. Yet in reality, state provision is completely subject to the vagaries of national fortune and the preparedness of tax-payers to pay.

The spurious idea of a "right" to welfare, to healthcare or to education allows us to forget that we are, in fact, dependent on the sense of duty of others and that these others require society, including us, to provide them in turn with resources if they are to be able to carry out these duties.

There is more genuine stability in well-established traditions of constant voluntary activity, if these are rooted in religious societies which have a comprehensive concern with the whole of human life - and so are, for this reason, themselves genuine "polities."

But of course there is the problem both of gaps and of coordination. It is for this reason that the state has a genuine role and that increasingly we are seeing hybrid arrangements.

One can fear, with Prochaska, that if much of the money for charities comes from state provision that they will fall under bureaucratic control. But on the other hand, if the state is itself relying on voluntary contributions, and on a more "hands-on" voluntary approach, then the influence can go in the other direction.

Prochaska shows that one reason for the decline of religion in the UK is its perceived "irrelevance" once it has ceased to be involved in the supply of social services and the coordination of economic activity.

It then follows that "the Big Society" presents a huge opportunity for the restoration of "the big parish" in which care for body and soul go once more hand in hand. It is this opportunity that Common Wealth crazily wishes to forego.

Let me here conclude with two final comments.

First, whether or not one agrees with the Coalition's agenda, the churches have no warrant to refrain from providing necessary services in order to make a political point. That would be to betray the gospel.

Secondly, to imagine that the state and not the Church is the proper supplier of mercy, education and health is, quite simply, a form of practical atheism, of sheer disbelief.

For what are the real motivations of the state after all (at least, after it has cast-off any lingering odour of British Hegelianism)? Surely they are to secure its economic and military might, combined with the desire to keep the populace in order through a neo-pagan deployment of bread and circuses?

It is, by contrast, only religion that is likely to care for the person as person - as someone possessed of an immortal spirit who is therefore "more" than any collectivist whole and who is to be considered an agent of duty as well as a recipient of rights.

Given that, for Christians, what matters supremely is our final destiny, both individually and in common, is it not little short of incredible that churches should endorse any process of education that neglects the vital truth about our souls or any process of medicine not concerned with the soul as well as the body?

We should once again realise that we need what is Christian in order to salvage the merely human. Otherwise, under a secular aegis, the doctor, the teacher or the social worker are forced to "bracket out" of consideration all the personal, particular stuff that really matters about the human individual that she is daily dealing with.

Actions

Share

On the Wider Web

For a very long period, religious people supposed that one could construe secularity as metaphysical neutrality and benign indifference. But increasingly, this mask is being torn away and it is the supposedly marginal issues of "conscience" which are most of all in public dispute.

To disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.

The will of the people is not sacrosanct. Democracy is not a god; it is a servant. Not a servant to be treated with contempt, but where it persists in an error that can be shown to be detrimental to those it exists to serve, a servant that can and should be asked to think again. We are sick with fear and fastened to a dying animal. The dying animal is not the European Union. It is this misbegotten "will of the people."

Best of abc.net.au

NT grower expects to harvest most mangoes ever

A Top End mango farmer is headed for the best season since his family started farming 30 years ago.

Twitter

Subscribe

Receive updates from the ABC Religion &amp; Ethics website. To subscribe, type your email address into
the field below and click 'Subscribe'.

Subscribe

How Does this Site Work?

This site is where you will find ABC stories, interviews and videos on the subject of Religion &amp; Ethics. As you browse through the site, the links you follow will take you to stories as they appeared in their original context, whether from ABC News, a TV program or a radio interview. Please enjoy.